Description
Book SynopsisCollection of essays focusing on cultural policy and production after the Mexican revolution
Trade Review“
The Eagle and the Virgin is a necessary book, a selection of essays which allows readers to see in detail how a nation is invented and reinvented, how it experiences its achievements and its customs, both the good and the bad; and how it is internationalized and nationalized (since by 1940 Mexico was both a more cosmopolitan country and a more Mexican one). A delightful work.”—
Carlos Monsiváis“Steeped in a generation of new cultural and transnational analysis of state formation and popular expression,
The Eagle and the Virgin raises the bar for studies of nation building and cultural politics in postrevolutionary Mexico. Particularly impressive is the volume’s sensitive analysis of contests over religious culture and symbols, its gendered understanding of state formation, and its handsomely illustrated treatment of the development of a Mexican revolutionary aesthetic.”—
Gilbert M. Joseph, coeditor of
The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics“The 16 essays that Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis have compiled here inventively probe and synthesize the synergistic processes of nation building and cultural revolution that characterized Mexico in the period from 1920 to 1940. . . . The vibrancy and variety of these essays remind us that culture is integral to any analysis of this crucial period in the formation of Mexican national identity, because Mexico’s cultural revolution is so inimitable in its many contested manifestations. As this volume demonstrates, its very creativity and inconsistency are fundamental to understanding the complexity of the interactions that took place between the state and popular sectors.” -- Susan M. Deeds * Hispanic American Historical Review *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations xii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction / Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis 1
I. The Aesthetics of Nation Building
The Noche Mexicana and the Exhibition of Popular Arts:
Two Ways of Exalting Indianness / Rick A. Lopez 23
The Sickle, the Serpent, and the Soil: History, Revolution, Nationhood, and Modernity in the Murals of Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros / Desmond Rochfort 43
Painting in the Shadow of the Big Three
Frida Kahlo / Sarah M. Lowe 53
Maria Izquierdo / Adrianna Zavala 67
The Mexican Experience of Marion and Grace Greenwood / James Oles 79
Mestizaje and Musical Nationalism in Mexico/ Marco Velazquez and Mary Kay Vaughan 95
Revolution in the City Streets: Changing Nomenclature, Changing Form, and the Revision of Public Memory / Patrice Elizabeth Olsen 119
II. Utopian Projects of the State
Saints, Sinners, and the State Formation: Local Religion and Cultural Revolution in Mexico / Adrian A. Bantjes 137
Nationalizing the Countryside: Schools and Rural Communities in the 1930’s / Mary Kay Vaughan 157
The Nation, Education, and the “Indian Problem” in Mexico, 1920–1940 / Stephen E. Lewis 176
For the Health of the Nation: Gender and the Cultural Politics of Social Hygiene in Revolutionary Mexico / Katherine E. Bliss 196
III. Mass Communication and Nation Building
Remapping Identities: Road Construction and Nation Building in Postrevolutionary Mexico / Wendy Waters 221
National Imaginings on the Air: Radio in Mexico, 1920–1950 / Joy Elizabeth Hayes 243
Screening the Nation / Joanne Hershfield 259
IV. Social Construction of Nations
An Idea of Mexico: Catholics in the Revolution / Jean Meyer 281
Guadalajaran Women and the Construction of National Identity / Maria Teresa Fernandez Aceves 297
“We Are All Mexicans Here”: Workers, Patriotism, and Union Struggles in Monterrey / Michael Snodgrass 314
Final Reflections: What Was Mexico’s Cultural Revolution? / Claudio Lomnitz 335
Contributors 351
Index 357
